CSMBR Upcoming Lecture
Ben Kavoussi
28 May 2026 – 5 PM (CET)
A 14th-century Persian medical manual on the Medicine of Cathay (Northern China) known as the Tānksūqnāmah-yi Īlkhān dar funūn-i ʿulūm-i Khaṭāʾī (Tānksūqnāmah) explicitly states that blood “makes rounds” within the body, flowing from the liver to the heart, then to the lungs, and returning again to the liver.
Commissioned by the vizier and physician Rashīd al-Dīn Hamadānī (1247–1318) during Mongol rule in Iran, the manual is an attempt to explain Chinese medicine to a Persian readership, translating a book that summarised Chinese medical knowledge at the time.
Drawing on Chinese cosmology and medicine, as well as the Graeco-Arabic medical tradition, the book ultimately advances its own conception of blood movement, moving beyond simple continuity. This model, which links bodily processes to celestial movements, differs from the philosophical description of pulmonary transit by Ibn al-Nafīs (1213–1288) and the quantitative theory of systemic circulation by William Harvey (1578–1657).
The Tānksūqnāmah is therefore best understood as a product of the distinctive cross-cultural milieu of Mongol-era Iran, exemplifying how scientific ideas can emerge through reinterpretation within zones of cultural and scientific contact rather than through linear transmission within a single lineage.
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